4 ms·
[Sorry in advance if this is a little off-topic] Gtk4 has a lot of potential to be disruptive if the tooling becomes at least competitive to what other framewo
by sebow 5y ago
[Sorry in advance if this is a little off-topic]
Gtk4 has a lot of potential to be disruptive if the tooling becomes at least competitive to what other frameworks have (qt, flutter,etc).
For now it's a serious choice (or the only choice) if you develop for linux.There are cases where this is desirable and if you have a product that has multiple 'native' versions and that's good, but most often than not that's not the case.
-Language bindings(this is where gtk is overlooked and has a solid position, being written in a low-level language it already satisfies one segment of developers and through bindings the other half)
And either:
-A decent designer tool (glade and cambalanche exist - they're better than nothing, sadly would say they're not production-ready)
-Or some (possibly community-driven, which can be the case since gtk is open) extensions for couple major IDEs/editors: think emacs,vscode,intellij-based.This is where gtk is way behind flutter/qt and i think they can gain the most since a lot of developers rely (for good or worse) on editor extensions.
And i'm willing to guarantee that gtk will be often be picked as a solid alternative.Again, this is not bashing against gtk4, because it's free and my talk is worth nothing compared to contributors, but these are just my 2 cents.
- floatboth 5y ago> not production-ready Glade is very mature, people use it extensively for serious software: https://blog.horizon-eda.org/misc/2021/01/29/glade.html https://blog.horizon-eda.org/misc/2021/01/29/glade.html Cambalanche is a fresh start, with gtk4 in mind, of course it's not production ready yet. But I'm really excited about it, the architecture is cool (probably the best use of the broadway backend ever)
- littlestymaar 5y agoIsn't Glade obsolete? I'm pretty sure I've read a blog post from GTK folks telling people to stop using it. Edit: Ok, it's the first link in your link, which is a rebuttal to this exact blog post.
- smoldesu 5y agoI agree, but I think the biggest issue is that GTK4 no longer feels like a "native" toolkit. To get it working properly on Linux, you need to sandbox your application and load more assets into memory than the average Electron app. Then you factor in how difficult GNOME makes it to feel native on other systems, how difficult it is to write a GTK4 app properly (as you highlighted with your designer tool point) and how little people care about making it feel right on other platforms... it unfortunately looks like GTK4 insists on shooting itself in the foot every time it turns the corner. I've personally been happy to stick with GTK3, which doesn't fall victim to the majority of those issues. It's still not ideal, but one thing is apparent: the potential of the GTK toolkit is being actively squandered...
- kzrdude 5y agoIs disruptive good or bad in this case?